Thursday, 17 April 2014

Horror of the Zombies (1974)

Most of you will not appreciate the enormity of this statement - for which you should be grateful - but this is a worse movie than Zombie Lake.

I mean, there are certainly a few ways in which it is better than Lake. For one thing, the zombie makeup is a bit more sophisticated than a bunch of guys with green paint on them and unpainted skin clearly showing at their collars.

On the other hand, it is really, really dull. The zombies don't turn up until 40 minutes in, and even then they lurch with such incredible slooooooowness that they'd be hard-pressed to catch a crippled snail. Fortunately for them, they're chasing people who are stupider than any mollusc ever.

Our movie begins with a model looking for her roommate. Possibly the missing woman is not just her roommate, based on the dialogue, but the film won't actually go anywhere with that angle. Her boss tries to brush her off but she's persistent, which leads to her being abducted and forcibly dragged off on a rescue mission for her missing friend.

No, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.

Anyway, the rescue mission discovers an old Spanish galleon near where the missing friend (who was on a boat for ... reasons) and they go aboard. Most of the party falls asleep (as I wish I could have done), and the model searches the ship alone.

The zombies wake up and eat her, as they previously did her friend.

This is only an hour into the 90 minute film, mind you, so we just killed the person who appeared to be the protagonist. The film now focuses on the people who abducted her, and their attempts to escape the doomed ship. Frankly, I didn't care if they survived and just wanted the film to be over.

This film - also known as The Ghost Galleon - was the third in the 'Blind Dead' series. I hear rumours that the first two are actually worth seeing. This is not.